This week we had an opportunity to attend Also Cloud Expo 2014 in Wanha Satama, Helsinki, Finland. Onrego had a booth and I had a speech about how customers are making a movement from producing their own IT infrastructure to service management and cloudsourcing. Let’s summarize the event with couple of pics.

The first ever Also Cloud Expo had an amazing spirit. It was about collaboration between doers and partners, driving the industry to the same direction and not seeing each other as a competitor. It was seeing each other as an opportunity to build the future and a competitive cloud service portfolio that creates value to customers.

Big news was published just couple of days before Also Cloud Expo: ALSO acquired Nervogrid. The acquisition made ALSO the leading Cloud Broker and the whole Expo was guided by the same message: now MSP’s and IT resellers can start to build a cloud service portfolio for their customers with no need to develop and do everything again if someone has already done it.

Mr. Perttu Monthan (@monthan) opened the event, followed by Mr. Jukka Kortesniemi from ALSO and Mr. Ari Rikkilä (@ari_rikkila) from Nervogrid (or ALSO Cloud, nowadays).

Mr. Samuli Savo (@samusavo) from Marketvisio kept an interesting keynote about insights of cloud services.

Couple of key takeaways from Samuli are:

• It is wrong to compare just the price tag of on-premises installation and cloud service. To most organizations, agility matters and is the driver towards cloud.
• Customers tend to buy cloud services from their trusted advisors.
• MSP’s and IT resellers should focus on their added value on value chain: why would customers buy cloud services from you, if they can buy it from cloud service provider, such as Microsoft.
• IaaS will grow a lot in the near future (and companies need cloud based server and service monitoring systems to monitor decentralized datacenters, such as Online System Center by Onrego)
• Cloud Brokerage will also grow a lot in the future: the takeaway for MSP’s and IT resellers is: use and resell cloud services that already exists and create your own place in the value chain.

My speech was right after Samuli’s great keynote. I wanted to share our experience and customer stories about how customers are shifting from producing IT by themselves to service management.

I started by talking about outsourcing and how total outsourcing cases have been disappearing while customers are shifting to cloudsourcing model. One great opportunity for MSP’s and IT resellers is the fact in which customers that are now doing everything by themselves, are ready to move from insourcing straight to cloudsourcing. This creates a whole new market. The market is called Cloud Brokerage.

  

 

Jarno (@jarnomaki)